electophotography of flowers

Hello Fall 10-ers! I have two older posts that you might find interesting. They both have to do with questions of identity and language, and how the question of subjecthood, and of one’s subjecthood as having a beginning that is not quite at “birth.” In our conversation about Roberta Culbertson we sort of came at this question from the backend, in thinking about the death of the self, the self in relation to pain, and so on.

(By the way: If you want to look at it, I’ve actually written on Culbertson in relation to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. I am sure several of you have read the novel and will find the article interesting. It’s also written for people who haven’t read the novel, so others might still find it interesting as well. Click here to read it online.)

Here are the posts:

• The first post begins with the etymology for “infant,” but also looks at a few articles that map the word/concept at different historical moments. Some interesting archival stuff!
• The second post offers an article on the whole memory/language debate. Such interesting stuff!

Oh, and by the way, the photo on this post is a kirlian photograph, a type of photography, electrophotography, mentioned by Linda Hogan in The Woman Who Watches Over the World.

And, oh, by the way again, I just caught a post on one of Passing’s blogs, which mentions Butler’s Kindred and that also includes a description of the book!

Here are some quotes:

It’s hard to say exactly when the idea of a second self came into play. Presumably the recognition of a soul appeared hand-in-hand with human consciousness, and it was probably voiced when we had language to put the idea of a soul into words. That would place the time frame for a soul around 200,000 years ago, when humans experienced a cultural explosion which they expressed in art, clothing, and evidence of religion.

[...]

It might also be an evolutionary strategy that takes us away from the anxieties of self-consciousness. Once fully modern humans knew they could die, it probably made sense to pretend that no one really died but that some part of us lived on into the cosmos.

The one question we didn’t quite get to as much as I would have liked to, is the place of death, mortality, in our reckoning of what counts as “the human.”

Further, if we imagine that cultures often have myths–truths, allegories, full-truths, and half-truths–that reflect the human predicaments of their times, how might we interpret one of the most haunting notions donors are concerned with: their fear that completion doesn’t come after the fourth donation. What is the meaning of that horror to Ishiguro’s novel?

Puppy Cam

“The aftermath of a car bomb explosion today in a popular market in Amil district in Baghdad.” (NYT)

G-Unit: rap emptied-out, having its new emptiness revealed. Wrong things in wrong places, or random things in right places; uncanny symmetries.

The Uncanny: “a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.” Mine but not mine. But if not yours, then whose? Many dead.

[Jay-Z]
Ma, I ain’t gotta tell you but it’s ya boy Hov
From the U.S., you just, lay down slow
Catch ya boy minglin’ in England, nettlin’ in the Netherlands
Checkin’ in daily under aliases
We rebellious, we back home, screamin’ leave Iraq alone
But all my soldiers in the field, I will wish you safe return
But only love kills war when will they learn
It’s international Hov, I been havin’ the flow
Before Bin Laden got Manhattan blowed
Before Ronald Reagan got Manhattan blowed
Before I was cappin’ it then back before
Before we had it all day, poppin’ in the hallway
Cop one offa someone to give you more yey
Yea, but that’s another stor-ay
But for now mami turn it around and let the boy play

– Panjabi MC f/ Jay-Z, “Beware of the Boyz.” Or sample it as “Mundian to Bach Ke”

Now you are ready to rewind back to 2003, South Asianified/Middle Easternized beats are all over hip-hop.

Patel in “Bhangra Over Bombs Over Baghdad,” Village Voice, gives us this:

This isn’t like DJ Quik’s “Addicted” or Erick Sermon’s “React” because that’s just hip-hop jackin’ for beats wherever them beats is found. This is jumping on a bhangra track intact, giving a shout to the Neptunes, dropping your BK hustle, and coming out clean on the other side. This is rhythmic dialogue where duplicity indeed exists. And for all my brown folks on the fringes of musical exoticism—the Punjabi Wall Streeters on line at SOB’s, the Sikhs parading down Broadway, the Sean Pauls who DJ over bhangra riddims, and the Lenkys who make them—this is cultural validation.

But then Tina Chadha, also reporting at the Voice, gives us this, “Mix This: Young South Asians’ Love-Hate Relationship with Hip-Hop’s New Indian Beats”:

“Some hip-hop artists don’t give a shit about Indian people,” says Vidya Murthy, a 23-year-old in marketing at an entertainment magazine, reacting to the belly dancing and harems in videos for songs like Truth Hurts’ “Addictive” and Erick Sermon’s “React” that clearly sample Indian music. Sunaina Maira, author of Desis in the House, a study of second-generation Indian Americans growing up in New York, says that for young Indians these images bring back memories of growing up unrecognized and of confronting racism.

But then we finally come to this. Hope? Timbaland at the end of the Chadha article:

“People getting into the beats now don’t know the history. They play-toy with it,” says the Grammy-nominated producer, who researches the culture. “These people have a voice that needs to be heard. We’re trying to make ‘world hip-hop.’ “

Tim says he doesn’t think this sound is a passing fad: “It’s different enough to last.” Even Truth Hurts, who initially didn’t know India was in Asia, is sticking with the Indian rap game. “I think us just sampling Indian music and trying to make it our own gets cheesy after a while,” says Truth. “That’s why I’m working with the new U.K. bhangra producers, the Krey Twinz. And I’m definitely going to have Indian people in my video and show the culture.” She’s even set to appear in an “America meets Bollywood” film. Sermon, who says he didn’t know his song was offensive until now, promises next time he’ll be more aware. “With Panjabi MC’s song there is going to be a surge of people asking questions and learning more,” he assures.

Hmm. My sense of hope in culture and cultural difference is improved (though my upcoming Angelina Jolie post might put the kibosh on that!)

It’s too bad it’s time for me to stop, because I wonder where Shakira fits into this.

But I do think that if I am to continue this post, which I might later in the week, I want to go back to where I began, back to the death, and to the politics of the global uncanny.

[a. OF. enfant, -aunt (F. enfant, Pr. enfan, Sp., Pg., It. infante) child:L. infns, infnt-em child, n. use of infns unable to speak, f. in- (IN-³) +fns, pres. pple. of f-r to speak. Aphetized FAUNT.] 

There is much to say on many topics! But right now I am working on your Lacan podcast. In the meantime, keep the comments and questions coming, to help center our conversation and so that I can respond in class tomorrow.

I just want to take a moment to post some relevant NYT articles that have been mentioned by myself and others this week and last. Take a look at them; they are all quick reads:

“Infants’ Sense of Pain Is Recognized, Finally” (1987): On the infant and pain question, there are multiple sources, but I thought this one might be interesting, as it comes from the moment of the big realization.

“MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF INFANTS” (1881): Pretty funny, and pretty old. It is funny in the author’s rhetorical dismissal of the questionnaire as against “common sense.” But it is also interesting in The American Social Science Association’s approach and interest in these questions.

“Researchers Trace Empathy’s Roots to Infancy” (1989): On mimicry, empathy, knowing. Also, insight into how researchers measure response and make meaning out of it (which should also remind you of the Eula Bliss essay, as well).

More generally, the empathy question has come up in various contexts this semester, and we will continue with it more specifically. I have an old post from my Faulkner and Morrison class that might be useful. Click here to read it (AILD is As I Lay Dying and SatF is The Sound and the Fury).

Enjoy!

As I mentioned in class the other day, it is important to extend “rotten English” so that, conceptually, the term not only speaks to language, but also to how the transformations and modifications that are made possible through language-use might also impact cultural production on the level of form–to “rotten form.”

Further, considering “rotten form” might help us comment on how in a larger sense cultural production is also potentially transformed by, or perhaps merely subject to, the same social and political forces that have so heavily impacted language. The possibilities inherent in form might also be subject to the same losses and gains that we normally associate with a population’s “access” to a “global” language, English.

Rottenness, expansion, is in the various ways M. Nourbese Philip puts her poems on the page: “English is a foreign l/anguish,” and it is also in mashups (here is a favorite of mine), in pop art movements, in films made by cell phone, and so on. It is not only about the spread of language, but also the spread and proliferation of technological access, which I am sure I will have more to say about in another post! But I will say now that there are some compelling questions on the path that gets us from African American vernacular to hip-hop, word to sampling, and then from American hip-hop to artists like Afrikan Boy and The Wilcannia Mob, whom we hear from on two of the M.I.A. songs we are looking at this week, “Hussel” and “Mango Pickle Down River.”

(I am not sure, but I wonder if we might toss YouTube into the fray, with “rotten marketing,” as in the case of Wayne Wang’s new film, The Princess of Nebraska, which is being distributed exclusively on YouTube. But the parameters, of course, are different for an established filmmaker, perhaps instead pointing to how that which begins “rotten” is quickly assimilated into the mainstream. Now it’s fresh! As A.O. Scott asks in his review of Wang’s film, “Is the YouTube release of a feature film by a well-known director a gimmick or a harbinger of things to come?”)

But, again, rotten language, rotten form–expansion, difference, transformation, and also technology. This brings me to M.I.A., coming to us from “Sri Lanka (via), London and South East United Kingdom,” and whose music not only incorporates global Englishes, but also highlights globalized cultural forms. Like many of the artists we are looking at this semester, M.I.A.’s work is also centered on the “metropole” as a figure, and demonstrates how rotten Englishes and forms are informed by a history of influence, be it through colonization, slavery, or immigration, but also how appropriations of languages and form also contribute to new recenterings, turning an audience’s gaze to sites that may now as easily be conceptualized as the new centers of cosmopolitan culture as they were once names for peripheries.

Further, the historical centers of metropolitan “culture” are also reconfigured in this movement. When M.I.A. calls out to London and New York at the beginning of “Bucky Done Gun,” any racial and cultural signification inherent in those city names is remastered, remixed, by the context in which they appear: in their serialization with Kingston and Brazil; in the injunction in M.I.A.’s voice, “quieten down”; and in how the song musically and visually references the various places named–for instance in her visual reference of  LL Cool J’s “Momma Said Knock You Out” (NY), her kinetic reference to African American and black Caribbean dance forms, in the performance of Afro-Brazilian drumming–and also by virtue of how the very fact of the song, despite its ostensibly various elements, has been transformed by M.I.A. into a single unit of recognition, her song.

Clearly, there is much to say on rotten form, but, for now, let’s just turn to an element of form, sound. Sound has come up several times in our class– for instance tensions between the pleasing sound of a vernacular versus how it looks on the page, or how so much race and class meaning is attached to the sound of a voice, to whether or not one is “tokn yir/ right way a/ spellin,” to use Tom Leonard’s construction.

But even as we so often take the question of power in language as in reference to the disparity signified in our reception of standard or rotten language, it is also important to remember that members of vernacular communities also find social value in the rejection of standard English, which they often quite often know, but also choose not to use. This is apparent on the surface of John Kasaipwalova’s “Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes,” which is narrated in local languages, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu, but in which the narrator’s command of standard or even “high” English is also demonstrated, thus revealing an explicit choice in his foregrounding of the non-standard. By making the code-switch apparent, audience and community, inside and outside, us and them, are reflected, and reflected upon, in the narrator’s linguistic movement.

This brings us to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” which includes a scene featuring Jay-Z performing multiple voices, his rap persona, the voice he uses when speaking to the police, and his reproduction of the cop’s voice. In the juxtaposition of these various voices, Jay-Z makes apparent much of what is at stake in the performance of any cultural voice, in any choice of code. Further, there is a certain kind of knowingness, some revelation of other full worlds, that also comes in the video’s use of imagery, and that hews closely to the reversed cultural gaze apparent in Jay-Z’s moments of switch and ventriloquism.

Here’s a story at the NYT. This article mainly focuses on the play’s director, Paul Chan, and  also offers us some interesting feed for our class, particularly vis-a-vis art as activism, a la Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy.“

Some of you might also be interested in this play as a way of understanding the notion of site specificity, which I have talked to several of you about in office hours.

Also, Prof. Drabinski sent me this link for us to check out. It’s to a slideshow at CNN.com, which highlights a group’s efforts to add panels for African Americans to the national AIDS quilt. The group is called “Call My Name.”

Finally, thanks to Joe for this article, which, as he points out on one of the class blogs, speaks to several of the themes that are culminating for us at the end of the semester.

Please do not forget your blogging assignment for Tuesday. The idea is to choose a single approach to your reading of Adrienne Kennedy, to read though a lens. All of these approaches begin in rather simple and baseline ways, but the purpose of the exercise is to push the approach into telling you something deeper about the play in general, to consider the relationship between mechanism and meaning.

(It is fine if you have already started or are already done: this is just to spur those of you who have not yet begun!)

Here are some suggestions:

–If you are interested in theater, for instance, imagine how you would stage this play. Walk us through a scene.

–If you are interested in literary approaches, consider mapping the text’s use of allusion. What kinds of stories are told through stories in Kennedy’s play? How does she make (or what’s at stake in) her leap from allusion to intertextuality (1 & 2)?

–If you are interested in maps, how would you read the text’s spatiality, both literally and symbolically? What is the relation between the literal and symbolic in Kennedy’s play?

And remember, all of the above suggestions are grounded in hints from Kennedy herself: 1. It’s a play (duh!); 2. quotes abound, and flourish; 3. Suzanne is obsessed with maps and space.

Too easy? Look for other kinds of hints, particularly viz. signifying chains. For example:

The play references Battleship Potemkin; the line, “who is Eisenstein?” is highlighted in the dialogue. We can free-associate–or google our way into association with the relevant terms!–montage, using Renaissance space, communism, and so on. What kind of meaning might be derived from following a single chain of signification?

Your blogging has been looking good, especially as I imagine that you are all itching to “get back to the book.”

But oh! please know that all of this is for the book, in honor of it, even.

Again, if we imagine that literature has anything to teach us, then it is on us to look at all the different kinds of ways that teaching might happen. Sometimes that means looking at the social and historical milieu of a text. Sometimes it means looking to source texts that might help us decode writerly decisions. Sometimes, like now, it means expanding the conceptual apparatuses with which we approach texts. True, one might argue that a text’s meaningfulness comes to us through its beauty, but I am pretty sure y’all have the appreciation part down– now it’s time for the rigor.

I am reminded of the final lines of Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which I like to think of as a beautyful poem that best captures the pleasure and frustration of scholarly contemplation:

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

That’s right: we will stare and stare, brought closest to truth at the moments when we are simultaneously most affected by a text and most aware of our distance from it.

Sigh.

So stare at “empathy” and “sympathy.” Not in order to find straight examples of empathy and sympathy in Faulkner, rather to rub the terms together. See where they come together, and where they diverge. Use them to conceptually spatialize some of the human relationships in AILD. This is where several of your posts over the weekend seem to be going: push it harder.

Remember, mapping space and finding geometry aren’t only about laying down material relations; they are also strategies for locating the parts of ourselves that by necessity exist in relation to parts of others: call it entanglement, imbrication, or Lacan’s notion of “the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s verifications.” Entanglement is the definition of family, but, as AILD and SatF have shown us, this plays out in startling and disturbing ways–especially when we add the notion of the texts themselves being metaphors for larger social or historical phenomena AND a notion that Faulkner’s material geographies might also reflect psychic meanings within the texts themselves.

Anyway, here are some treats for your pre-class thinking. The first is this post I found on Objectify This. It’s about “empathy bellies” for men who want to experience what their wives/girlfriends/baby’smamas are experiencing in pregnancy. The post touches on several of the questions we raised in our own discussion on Thursday, and, unexpectedly, also comes back to the equality question. Check it out.

Strangely, that same day, I came across this article in The New York Times, about the Underground Railroad in Brooklyn. Half way down there is a description of Henry Ward (you know, the guy standing next to the Octagon) Beecher’s abolitionist techniques:

“Beecher’s most successful tactic for arousing what he called “a panic of sympathy” for slaves was to stage mock slave auctions in the church, with the congregation bidding furiously to buy the captives’ freedom.”

Um, yeah. You should go read it.

You know, if you’re interested in the sympathy/empathy thing in its historical American uses, James Baldwin has a pretty interesting take on the matter in Notes of a Native Son (speaking on Richard Wright and Harriet Beecher Stowe), and Saidiya Hartman has a pretty interesting book on the subject, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

Rest assured, you can read Kennedy’s play without the Hardy (otherwise I wouldn’t have assigned it!), but it is also good to seek out more information. In fact, this is the kind of seeking-out you should do whenever you are reading literature. When you don’t know something, pause. Ask yourself: is this something I could learn a little bit more about? If the answer is “yes,” then of course go for it. If the answer is no, file it away. At some point your analysis of the text might be tripped-up by this thing you do not know– but knowing that you do not know it will make recovery easier.

And there is almost always a middle-space. It often has a name: wikipedia. Again, as I’ve said in class, the wik is not a great primary source, but when you need dates, geographies, or plot summaries, it is a nice place to start. If you are going to write a paper on the function of the Hardy text in Kennedy’s play, then wikipedia is not enough; you must read the book. But if you need to get the gist of the Hardy, so as to consider why Kennedy has chosen this text… you get my point.

So here are some links to get you started. I will likely not give you this much information again. This is just to give you a sense of the kinds of things you might look for while reading any book.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles on Wikipedia
A map of Ohio State University (recent)
The Battleship Potemkin on Wikipedia
Frantz Fanon on Wikipedia, and also at Emory

Enjoy!

]]> http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/66-reading-the-ohio-state-murders/feed/ 0 mp http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/66-jena-o-j-and-the-jailing-of-black-america/ http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/66-jena-o-j-and-the-jailing-of-black-america/#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:21:23 +0000 marisa http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/66-jena-o-j-and-the-jailing-of-black-america/ ]]> Over the weekend, The New York Times published an op-ed by famed sociologist Orlando Patterson. I, personally, thinks it slips too many things together too quickly, though I guess its purpose is to elicit a response out of the mixture, to get us to think about a particular confluence of effects and affects.

Aside from the article’s content, per se, I found it particularly relevent to today’s class. Like Petry, Patterson is trying to get us to see all these things about where race and gender come together, and the negative and positive consequences therein.

Interesting stuff! I would really like you to read it, if you get a chance. Feel free to leave comments below.

]]> http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/66-jena-o-j-and-the-jailing-of-black-america/feed/ 0 mp http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/paper-1/ http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/paper-1/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:16:26 +0000 marisa http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/paper-1/ ]]> Both classes should remember that papers are due BEFORE midnight, Monday night.

Johnson Chapel usually closes by 7p, so feel free to email the paper to me in order to meet the deadline, and bring a hardcopy to me later, either in my box on Tuesday before 3p or in class that same day. Please do not take your paper to the English Department office.

I randomly spot-check e-mailed papers against their hardcopies, so please be sure that they are the same paper, to save all the embarassment and sad-feelings.

I am no longer looking at drafts; I do not grant extensions, and, yes, I absolutely believe you can say something quite significant in 3 pages: economy of argument, precision in language, and a tight-leash on redundancy.

Good luck!

]]> http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/paper-1/feed/ 0 mp http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/66-reminder-mlk-recording/ http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/66-reminder-mlk-recording/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:04:12 +0000 marisa http://mparham.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/66-reminder-mlk-recording/ ]]> Hello all!

Just in case you have forgotten in the haze of paper-writing, remember that all you need for Tuesday is to have listened to the Martin Luther King, Jr. recording, “I’ve been to the Mountaintop,” and also be ready to talk about “Like a Winding Sheet.”

Chances are slim that we will get to the King on Tuesday, insofar as it seems that you all have a lot to say about the Petry story. Looking at the iMix link, it looks like the King is not there. Click here to download the audiobook version, which has a fabulous introduction/background piece at the beginning. And I am sorry I cannot get a copy to you, but my laptop died over the weekend, taking its riches to its grave (or at least the apple store in Holyoke!).

Here is a clip from the end of the speech, to watch AFTER you’ve listened to the rest. It’s only the last minute or so, but it is nice to get a visual to go with the voice.

Also, more resources are listed after the video.

Also:

Here’s a taste, but of course you should check out the article:

Infantile “amnesia” refers to the apparent absence or weakness of memories formed at ages younger than 3 or 4. Some evidence indicates that these early-life memories are not actually lost or forgotten, but are rather merely mislabeled or otherwise inaccessible to adult cognition. One potential reason for this inaccessibility is that adults tend to use language in encoding and retrieving memories, and this strategy may not be sufficient for retrieving memories formed in early-life, which may have been encoded before language is firmly entrenched in the developing brain.

According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl’s muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited below:

I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried it with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section— to tell what happened, and I still failed.[1]

What I found most interesting, however, are the comments people have left on the article. I spend a lot of time reading newspapers, etc., and am generally quite good at taking comments with a grain o’ salt. But these are pretty interesting in the way many refuse to believe anything in the article might be true (which is problematic if only because, in other parts of our national discourse, personal testimony rules).

And I’m not saying that the article is indeed airtight, or that there is no room for disagreement– but again, there is something particular about the way people are approaching this one that is quite interesting and problematic. Rather than go for its evidence, or its line of inquiry, many of the commenters go for its premise, which requires believing that racism is real.

You should check it out. Here are some key words: evidence, rhetoric, premises, negation, and audience.

This map shows the impact of recent migration from North to South, which changes the state’s meaning. No wonder they’re so kooky at election time (sorry Ali!

Click the map to see it bigger, and to read its accompanying post, which has more to say on the matter.

Again, the article isn’t directly related to our class viz. its content, but is extremely interesting both thematically and methodologically. If you are interested in writing about music this semester, particularly in relation to dissemination or ghosting, you really ought to check it out.

You can read Feld’s article by clicking here. I’ll add it to your sidebars as well.

Here is a sampling of what some of the original recordings would have sounded like.

And click here or the picture for the iMix.

If you are of the email sort, click the link that says Subscribe to mparham updates by Email. (That was clickable! Everything blue is clickable, and of course I will always pop some surprises in for you). If you choose the email option, everything I post here will come to your email late at night. How exciting is that? The email, however, only comes thru once a day, however, so you might experience a lag.

You might be wondering– Why bother with an extra site? Well, it’s only because it’s easier for me to post in one place, rather than the same thing over and over again across the various sites.

Posts for specific classes will have a number in front of them, 66 or 95, so of course it is fine to only click on the posts relevant to your own class.

Let me know if you have any questions.